LIPA

The project required creating additional highly serviced, high-performance space within Grade 2* listed higher educational buildings, in a conservation area and overlooked by Grade 1 Anglican Cathedral.

Aztec constructed a new 5 story steel framed extension on a specialist piled foundation and construction materials and methods were chosen and employed to carefully to sit alongside the existing listed fabric. Liverpool Stock Brick, Welsh slate roofing and extensive and detailed leadwork, welding/working of which is a dying art, to create the extension. The impact of the required level of servicing on the existing fabric necessitated creating new and utilizing existing service zones to mitigate ‘harm’ (Conservation terminology) to the grade 2* listed building and which required significant investigation.

The adaptation of 5 floors of existing Victorian floor plates and roofing over internal courtyard with planar glazed bespoke system was an incredible challenge within a “land locked “site. The coordination and design of infill glazed roof was a particular challenge: planar glazing required to be site measured and complexity of 4 interfaces ( circa 1830, circa 2014, circa 1890 and newbuild), statutory conditions on fixing points into historic fabric ( 1830 interface a stone frieze over 3 m depth and Georgian window heads ), no fixing into curtain walling, drainage falls and visual impact from upper floors of existing atrium adjacent.